“Well, sir. It’s somewhat complicated. Let’s see, how should I explain it? Ever seen Richard Burton in that cold war spy flick The Spy Who Came In From the Cold?”

“How could I, lieutenant? It’s not been filmed yet.”

“Oh, well, sir…”

“Skip it, lieutenant. John le Carré hasn’t even written the goddamn novel yet. I know who he is though—he’s been a valuable asset to us down the line. He already has helped us. But what does le Carré have to do with this young QT spy thing anyway? It ain’t in my bailiwick, mister. You DARPA guyz know that. So why are you bothering me? I’ve got serious business to take care of.”

“Well, sir. It means he’s a Quantum Time-traveler we sent back in time for some orientation standard training—the usual Telsa teleportation method. We’ve since switched over to the more advanced 3-D hologram QT process, but…”

“Skip the technical stuff, lieutenant. Just the goddamn facts. C’mon or get the fuck outta here.”

“Well, sir, he’s gone QT AWOL. Back there in time with this so-so US history jump—Gettysburg.”

“Gettysburg? Jesus christ, mister. This is 1950.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What’s the date again?”

“November 19, 1863.”

“Not that day? Lincoln’s address?”

“Yes, sir. We’ve got an old photo of the kid.”

General Corso looked at the image on the screen.

“Who’s the other guy?”

“What guy?”

General Corso swiveled the screen over so the lieutenant could see it on the vide-screen. The young intelligence officer was stunned. The digital image had changed—the hologram crystal had morphed in the last hour into something totally new. The kid had a companion. An officer in a captain's Union uniform. He was showing the kid a map or something.

The lieutenant leaned over the general’s desk, ogling at the screen. Then he pushed a DARPA file over the battle-grey old metal desk to Corso. The desk was an old memento piece of furniture from his WWII officer’s past—it seemed strangely outdated & out-of-place; yet Corso felt at ease with its beat-up, scarred appearance. Like an old B-17 out of the past. Corso rarely got nostalgic for the future tho. Especially after being in charge of the Roswell Research & Development black ops program.

The DARPA file was thick—but paper-clipped to it was an aging photo from a Civil War Archive showing this awkward kid shambling in front of the low podium where Lincoln would give his memorial Gettysburg Address.

But on the hologram screen, the QT crystal showed an officer, his face covered, in an intense conversation with the errant youth shambling his way through the mud in the updated time-image.

“So he was there before, huh?”

“Yes, sir. He teleported there with his father—a DARPA mathematician. Incognito though—letting the kid acclimate to the Effect. Everything seemed normal—there wasn’t any sign of trouble. No multiple time-line complications up until then. I mean now...”

“Yes, sir. We postulate that his mission to Mars assignment didn’t go well with him.”

“I don’t blame him. Mars is a fuckin’ goddamn Hell Hole anyway. No doubt about it. He went through the usual training orientation / debriefing I presume? Obviously he’s not good psyops material for you DARPA boyz.

“No, sir. But we had reports that down-line he’ll end-up being an important whistleblower in the future.”

“No sir—well,we got orders from the Top that he was a Special Agent. He’d escort & usher in the QT Revolution after the Japanese Yakuza Korea-China Mob Co-Prosperity Sphere incident. You know, after the Fukushima blowback & BP Gulf depop psyops came down.”

“Goddamn it, lieutenant. Who do you DARPA folks think I am anyway? You skip around in time like a bunch of stupid jerks... Playing God like it was some kinda stupid chess game—tweaking people's lives & popping zits on the fuckin’ Zeitgeist. I’m not your goddamn babysitter. I don't like what you're doing.""But, sir...""Get outta here, lieutenent. Go fuck yourself & find somebody else to play your goddamn games—I’ve got some serious business on my hands. You know my assignment, mister. Manage reverse engineering research from Roswell up to now. The Nazi Breakaway Gang down there in Peron's Argentina…they make you DARPA boyz look like a bunch of pusseys.”

General Corso bit down on his cigar stub—looking at his watch. He had an appointment coming up with some of the Big Bank Black Budget boyz—they were worried. They had their eyes on greasy Bormann fingers in the pie there in NYC & Berlin. Especially getting Germany unified again. Paperclip politics… plus the wall was coming down real soon...

“Where's this kid gonna run to now? To make his so-called defection? I presume you can't trace these Time-Traveler defectors...or can you?”

“Well, we don’t know where he went, sir. He left some enigmatic Zeitvernichtung signatures behind him—hinting DARPA could go to hell. He didn’t want to be assigned to Mars—it’s pretty hazardous up there; plus hostile to most humans.”

“I don’t blame the kid. That was a poor judgment on your part. Using young adolescents for the usual adult military psyops patsy programs—then getting rid of them if they become troublesome assets. So what if they go truant; they're just adolescents. You guyz are worth warm spit, you know that? I bet you were probably ready to off him up there. On the Red Planet?”

“Well, sir. He’s always been a security risk. But TPTB overruled us—they saw the advantage of using his excellent linguistic-legal skills later on for their own purposes. To use him as their “Teller of the Tale” Poster Boy. Not everybody agreed with it. Especially the Rumsfeld-Cheney Gang. Writers don't make good patsies, sir. But we're stuck with the kid for now. Plus he's a precog...”

“Yeah, I’ve heard all about Rumsfeld & Cheney. They’d use the kid, then use him to discredit himself & the program if they had to. Or set him up & blame him for something. All typically Machiavellian civilian bullshit…”

“Well, sir. This is between you & me—but for some reason the kid’s crucial to the whole Precog crime intervention crowd—TPTB are revising their whole Exopolitical strategy. Redefining the usual post-NWO late capitalism negotiations—to keep the Embargo going.”

“Yes, lieutenant. And DARPA is the Wizard of Oz…”

The lieutenant nodded reluctantly—knowing his last-minute mission with Corso had been a miserable failure. So much for his promotion...

“Skip the goddamn bullshit, lieutenant,” Corso said, eyeing the screen, blowing a series of smoke-rings at it. "You don’t even know who the other guy is. Another one of your errant DARPA precogs?”

The room was silent for awhile. Corso was thinking.

“Tell me, lieutenant. You think this kid is going to fuck up things back then? Like blow the whistle to Lincoln? Warn him about Ford’s Theater? Maybe screw up Reconstruction? How goddamn rogue is he gonna be?""We've got a loose cannon here, sir.""Or is he just a kid who’s sick of your constant, no-good mind-fucking him from grade school on? Why should he wanna be your asset in the future? So he'll end up like you?”

“Sir, we would never abuse…”

“Get outta here, lieutenant.""You're worried what the kid is telling the captain, aren't you? Your DARPA superiors are afraid he's a whistleblower? Gettin' ready to spill the beans on the future agenda? I wonder what Lincoln would think about your goddamn timeline nightmare plans?"

"But General Corso..."

"Go on, get out. You’ve messed with this kid bad enough big-time in my book—and now you’re messing with me. I’m not here to play your pawn in your Beltway power-games. I’m the corporate contact between Paperclip & the Nazis. They’re gonna go Breakaway soon enough—without any more help from us than they got already. That’s how the fascist-corporate mindset works, lieutenant. Even this stupid, lame-brained, old worn-out USAF general knows that. Go back to Rumsfeld & Cheney; and lick their asses, not mine. Good day, lieutenant.”

Precrime is on the run. Thu human race has a new timeline…the clocks are all striking thirteen._____________________

“You’re acquainted with the theory of precrime, I suppose? I presume we can take that for granted?” Anderton said coldly.

“I know about the precog mutants. You’ve managed to go back in time & redo key crime scenes before it happens,” said Witwer.

“Yes, the basic legalistic drawback to precrime methodology—that being the crime had actually already happened—is thus avoided since quantum time-travel gets us ahead of the criminal event.”

“But surely it will happen—it’s just waiting to happen by the time you get there, right?”

“Yes, Mr. Witwer. But our society is full of crime waiting to happen—despite the best psyops, there’s no way of stopping it.”

“Especially if the psyops people are the ones doing it.”

“Precisely. Unfortunately it has to happen first—before we can go in for any precrime prevention measures. Timing is everything.”

“I’m no analytical wizard, but there’s lots of paradoxes involved it seems to me. The detention camps are full of would-be criminals. And then, all the new time lines possibly triggered by your astute interventions?”

“That’s where all these computer banks & equipment come in, like the alt.welt hologram,” says Anderton cautiously. “The precogs help us as human data-receptors backing-up & predicting what the new time-line will be like after our precrime intervention. They’re beyond & ahead of the computers that simply study & evaluate these alt.welt scenarios. The precogs see thru & beyond the precrime maze of options—into the postcrime future.”

“Precrimes/postcrimes. Speaking of precogs—here they are. We normal human beings need the hologram to see the future—or we have to actually take the Tesla Time Machine back into time. The precogs are already there—they live inside synchronicity. All Time tenses are simultaneous for them—they live in a continuous present. Like a telepathic gang of idiot savants or child-idiots.”

“Geez, everything synchs. Even the fruitcakes. Yet they’re all so young.”

The screens are folding into themselves—projections of the hologram fractoids are coming in from the wired precogs & quantum jumpers. The screens are mental touch-screens—some think for themselves.

Suddenly the screens are telescoping & resolving themselves around one particular 4-D coordinate. Down here in the underground bunker, the lighting gets dim as the emergency lighting kicks in—a dull red light permeates the passageways. Something is happening—something is coming down…

“Excuse me,” Anderton says.

All the young precogs are directing their attention to one particular scene—all the analytical equipment & recording prophecy video-cameras are humming. All the personnel are turning their attention to the esp-deformation scene—fractalizing on the multiple-screens before Anderton & Witwer.

“What about Mars, Anderton?” Witwer breezily says, glancing at the action. The Mars shots have all disappeared. The Face, the Pyramid, the Egypto-images of New Cydonia…

“Mars can wait a little bit,” Anderton says. “A major precrime felony evasion is taking place. It involves actual murder & treason. We’ve been able to postpone it until an opera booth after the war. The culprits have a chance to commit the crime—we want to know who they are & the chances of morphing it the next time.”

The screens are dim & grainy—it’s back in the mid-1800’s. Something illegitimate is ahead—yet something else of tremendous social value is happening simultaneously, perhaps dwarfing & postponing the criminal event later on.

“Just see what happens,” says Anderton. “There he is—shambling thru the crowd. A pair of over-sized shoes. Dazed. Our chrononaut-kid.”

“Chrononaut-kid?” Witwer asks.

“Yes, our precrime trainee time-traveler—our chrononaut young spy. It’s just a training exercise. He’s been to Mars a couple of times. Now we’re inserting him into historic Earthtime reality shots. This one’s ambiguous—but important in various ways.”

Anderton feels the quickness of his voice—wishing he were young again. His conversation breaks off, his voice tightening.

“Earth has suffered for eonsas an exopolitical outcastamong the community ofUniverse civilizations.”—Alfred Lambremont Webre,EXOPOLITICS________________________

Three years before the case began, we assembled a team of sixteen futurist expert witnesses in Santa Monica to brainstorm the DARPA “UBIK/VALIS” case (2012) with Exopolitics advisors Alfred Lambremont Webre, Robert Stanley & Andrew D. Basiago.

Our expert witnesses included: Neil Gershenfeld, professor at the Media Lab at MIT; Shaun Jones, director of biomedical research at DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency); William Mitchell, dean of the school of architecture at MIT; Peter Calthorpe, the New Urbanism evangelist; Jaron Lanier, one of the inventors of virtual reality technology; Douglas Coupland, author and commentator; Stewart Brand, author, scientist and co-creator of The Well on-line community; Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired Magazine; Harald Belker, car designer and John Underkoffler, the science and technology advisor for the case.

The small storage media used throughout the case were clear plastic versions of Iomega's PocketZip disks.

The "PreCogs" are anonymous but in the depositions are all named after famous mystery writers: Dashiell Hammett, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Agatha Christie.

The tiny in-ear cellphones used throughout discovery (most noticeably with Pre-Crime Director “Lamar Burgess” (Max von Sydow) in the case’s final dimensional depositions are actually Bang and Olufsen earphones without the connection cables._____________________________

Settlement conference: Basiago tells Rumsfeld that he has two choices: choose not to commit the murder, thereby discrediting precrime; or commit the murder and go to jail but ultimately vindicate the system he created. [This is in fact the choice Anderton makes in the original PKD short story. Anderton at first realizes that the precogs prediction was wrong, and is able to choose not to commit the murder. However, when his would-be victim announces his intention to publicize this fact to discredit precrime, Anderton decides to kill him anyway—thus apparently proving the precogs correct and preserving the system he believes in.]________________________

“According to an impenetrable special notice from the D.S.O. of the D.A.R.P.A. of the D.O.D. (that’s the Defense Sciences Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense), the government wants to turn literary criticism into an exact science. D.A.R.P.A. invited interested literary theorists, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, and related “ists” to the Boar’s Head Inn in Charlottesville, Virginia, last month to answer a question frequently posed to junior-high-school students: “What is a story?”—The New Yorker

With the restoration of Imperial Rule, the interplanetary foreign affairs and trade of the New Japan Empire was monopolized by the Exxon Solar shogunate, yielding a huge profit in terms of oil, energy, gold, silver and other heavy metal mining developments of the Asteroid belt and Saturn’s rings.

The Exxon Solar shogunate ruled the known universe—but foreign trade was also permitted to the Shell Satsuma and Toyoto Tsushima domains. The Exxon Solar shogunate took power in 2068—somewhat peacefully according to the history discs in the Titan Japanese Archives.

But what was happening behind scenes—during that fateful Late BP Tokugawa shogun period?An unanticipated and rather complex “Space Opera” scenario was materializing for the Exxon leadership and intelligentsia.

Something quite unexpected was coming down with the advent of something totally new: unforseen interstellar foreign trade.The visits of the Sirius ships from Canis major were at first the main vector of extra-solar interstellar trade exchanges—followed by the additional influx of various “Vandals of the Void” types of decadent Vega-Los-Vegas casino planet tourists from the constellation Lyra.

These criminal and hoodlum-type Vega-Los-Vegas aliens were seeking new leisurely entertainment venues and vices for their con-artist business opportunities. They were curious about the new Exxon dynasty and wanted make business deals and contractual enhancements with TPTB to extend their gambling Empire.

Terran artistic-cultural enhancements had become stylishly in vogue and somewhat soup du jour for their already ancient and highly advanced decadent stellar civilization. The Vega-Los-Vegas mob had class and quickly made connections with the various still thriving Yakuza chivalrous organizations on Titan and elsewhere.

Aldebaran sex-slave mutants from the constellation Taurus had already made contact with puzzled Pluto colonists on the fringes and outskirts the Exxon Shogun solar system. These sophisticated androids were survivors of an ancient still unknown mega-world—lounging somewhere in their strange invisible 4th dimension world known as Miami Vice Prime.

One particularly powerful species of these preternatural alien intelligences came from the ruined world of “Ronald McDonald”—a long-dead alien clown civilization based on a 4th dimensional substance called the “organic id.”

Monsters of this strange interdimensional “id-force” were known as “Clowns from Outer Space”—and it was this Clown “id-force” that was picked up by a Titan teenage clairvoyante youth named Val van Vogt.

Van Vogt was a young Slan survivor from Planet Earth—one of the few American telepaths to make a safe exit from the BP Texas headquarters before the Apocalypto Disco End. He was taken in by the Exxon intelligentsia who soon realized the boy’s psychic economic potential for the new shogunate.

Little did they know what would happen.Virtually singlehandedly, young van Vogt did a narrative intervention at just the right time which virtually restructured the dominant paradigms of interstellar shogun time travel.It was similar to an obscure historical literary shift of consciousness known as the “Golden Age of Science Fiction”—a sudden short burst of energy between the ‘30s and the ‘50s on Earth which took traditional SF pulp fiction into a totally new dimension.

It was this telepathic linguisitcs shift which attracted the Clowns from Outer Space to the doorsteps of this Slan kid living on Titan.Unlike the hard-science aesthetic ideologies of the previous Late Tokugawa BP shogunate—the Exxon shogunate literary intelligentsia (thanks to this idiot savant boy van Vogt) skirted the typical old-fashioned Romantic and high modernist cliché thought patterns of the previous pulp fiction interplanetary genre paradigms for time travel. And proceeded to go where no BP executive had even thought possible.

The interdimensional key to this time travel breakthrough was the adolescent play of unconscious materials and fantasy dynamics released by simple clowning around—which the boy idiot savant van Vogt was good at. He didn’t take the 4th dimensional beings seriously—he laughed at them. He was just as interested in getting off and having porno wish-fulfillment fantasies as they were.

In fact, he showed the Clowns from Outer Space a trick or two.This total lack of any narrative intelligibility cannot be read as Exxon Shogunate naivete however—in the sense that the alien Other dialectic couldn’t be “conceptualized” by Exxon execs or even remotely “understood” through typical Terran canonization effects.

The Exxon Shogunates were smart cookies. They had to be to overcome their rivals—the BP mob.It’s precisely simply because of this cunning total lack of canon dominance—that a few new sub-literary conventions and lack of any intense “literary” effects made a new canonization of the Other possible.

The alien 4th dimensional Other—became known obliquely and tangentially. Clown pulp fiction effects like comix books and non-auteur film commercial underclass trashy B-movies made time travel possible. The parallels with historical surrealist procedures were inescapable.

Time travel, then, ended up being based on the most garish and vulgar kinds of Shogun junk and Japanese paraliterature—taking off in unexpected new directions every hentai-manga-anime moment.

Grasping the 4th dimensional image-thought process of the young Slan telepath Val van Vogt otherwise is hopelessly impossible—especially if one tries to “contain” this new yet ancient narrative style in a manageable straight literary prose operation.

Chicken-cooping a neo-narrative a coup d'état such as this is, well, somewhat difficult. See “Reflections of A. E. Van Vogt” (Titan Press, 2075, pp. 78-79)In that sense, the “irrational”and subjective “id-force” had a way of defusing and marginalizing most forms of privileged censorship.

Something that tragically the original surrealist Earth movement misconceived—a stunning and depressing historical irony for the preeminent anti-aesthetic vanguard Western avant-garde.It failed at despising itself—and not aiming for Literature as a radical transformation of daily life.

While van Vogt quite naturally flowed with the narrative of his own virtual dreaming—the logic of his fantasy, the unconscious free association and projection of his sheer adolescent campy imagination was what attracted the Clowns from Outer Space to him in the first place.

Sometimes some rogue Betelgeuse or inquisitive Alpha Orionis entity slipped out of mysterious same-time timewarp blackhole deepspace regions—to peek in at what was going on at the Ronald McDonald asteroid orbiting invisibly around the Slan kid’s Titan homebase.

Rumors of alien involvement back on Earth beneath Poughkeepsie were thoroughly investigated by PPI and the New York Times.From 2068 onward, Planet Japan, as the former Saturn moon Titan had become known as, started to participate actively in foreign intergalactic trade with not only the quixotic Space Clowns but with their allies the Zeta Zombies.

The adolescent ambassador for this foreign trade and cultural exchange was, of course, none other than the Slan youth himself. What fools they were to believe in him.By 2070, an embassy and trade mission under Captain Hasekura Tsunenaga got involved with the whole mysterious 4th dimension Others thing.

It was Tsunenaga’s kept boy—who supposedly was permitted by the Others to come & go through an intergalactic “glory hole” time-portal across the vast light-years abyss of the great space-time expanse known as the Sargasso Void.The Sargasso Void was so powerful that it crushed the highly advanced Japanese-built space galleon San Juan Bautista flatter than a pancake.

After 2068, the Shogun issued numerous permits for the newer so-called imperial “red seal ships”—destined for occasional Clown interstellar missions and free trade-exchanges. Analogies to historical Japanese international trade policies back on Old Earth are inescapable.

After 2080 and the introduction of the Space Seclusion Act and the banning of all Taser weapons, the only inbound extra-humanoid ships allowed were mostly from the Vega-Los-Vegas casino home planet.The popular cloned born-again “Liberace-Elvis the Pelvis” android daimyo handled all the business-angle comings & goings from then on. Thanks to specially-designed Heinlein-drive spaceships catering to bored extraterrestrials and other wealthy important alien tourisimo.

The fact is that “Earthboyz are easy”—got around the local decadent galactic in-crowd rather quickly. So that pretty soon—cute Yakuza Slan rough-trade numbers were much in demand.

Sunday, May 15, 2011

Fukasaku's new film, known as "Yakuza Planet," is a compelling Japanese SF crime drama, from the director of "Battle Royale."The plot centers on a 'haiku poet on the edge,' played by Tetsuya Watari, a character far more disturbed than, say, Dirty Harry or Popeye Doyle from "The French Connection." Indeed, Watari's rebelliousness seems far more shocking in the context of Japanese poetry, where respect for authority and conformity are supposedly ingrained.

Equally interesting is the portrayal of the Yakuza. It is a crime family in the mold of "The Godfather," but more prosaic and less self-important than the clan created by Francis Ford Coppola. Above all, the film's theme is the lack of honor in Japanese society. TEMPCO is corrupt, and in many respects indistinguishable from the Yakuza.

The central character, a young scifaiku Bashō poet, develops a close relationship with one of the Yakuza mobsters, whom he discovers is far more honorable and trustworthy than any of the TEMPCO corporate mobsters or BP Oil HAARP mobsters lurking in the background. All in all, a fascinating and fast-paced movie._______________________________

Just hours after the worst earthquake in a generation plunged Japan into crisis, the nation's mafia sprang into action. So began the yakuza relief effort By Jake Adelstein Saturday, 9 April 2011On 12 March

Around midnight, less than a day after a devastating earthquake tore through the Tohoku region of Japan, causing a tsunami that killed thousands and left many more homeless, 25 trucks bearing 50 tonnes of supplies arrived in front of the City Hall in Hitachinaka, in the east-coast Ibaraki prefecture.

Monday, May 9, 2011

“I don’t like to be aroundtwins, they make methink I’m seeing double.”—Robert Heinlein,Time for the Stars

—an ode to scifaiku

the thing about twins and heinlein's time for the stars—it’s a schizo-fragmented fictional text full of flatness and depth-loneliness, full of the twin's double angst, the loss of their individuality and personal style, the replacement by doppelganger pastiche of one’s sense of history and future memory

—scifaiku as techno-sublime

transcending modernist styles, all the jargon, badges and other decorations lost to schizo-frag collage, stream of consciousness, hysterical alienation, otherness surpassing our power to represent it, the stigmata of late cyberpunk, posmodernism and late capitalism

—scifaiku emerged in the late forties & fifties

emerging for me with robert heinlein's space cadet (1948) and red planet mars (1949) & time for the stars (1956), citizen of the galaxy (1957), have spacesuit will travel (1958), some of the best juvie sci-fi ever written, a style exuding assurance, savvy and slang, casualness, clever understatement, charm, smoothness free of jargon, seeming to come from a place where things were actually coming from, concealing considerable narrative craft and genuine characters as worlds of tomorrow

of sciencefictional imagination, the inability to envision the juvie imagination of the future and what the leisure-classes might do to avoid boredom—from four-dimensional chess to dabbling in xeno-archeology, protagonists entertaining themselves with time travel, shape-shifting, gender-morphing

scifaiku not knowing its limits—

paradoxically its highest aspiration the sense of wonder often found in paperback pulp fiction, the diamond in the junkyard debris, the perfect clarity of “juvie jouissance” first experienced by adolescent imagination usually dismissed as youthful illusion, but still interfused with the sense of sci-fi sublime and childhood’s end, hidden adroitly by vandals of the void, there beyond the furthest reaches of neptune, the nostalgia for planetary paradigm shifts, bordering on lost senses of juvenile sci-fi, understated by twin adolescent telepathy, modeled after heinlein’s time for the stars, the twin brothers, one consciousness, “prison-yard whispers,” joined together on “automatic pilot,” their futural rite of passage to the stars, their initiation ceremony and their growing-up pains beyond the beyond

the reading of scifaiku texts—

the sense of wonder inspired through parataxis paradigm shifts, variants of conceptual breakthroughs, telepathic dialog faster than the speed of light, time between the stars, the time between juvie then & now, created by the writer to give readers back then a glimpse of themselves with no further authorial aid—other than the pages of an ace paperback double-novel to guide them

“The United States and Japan face the most challenging security environment in the history of the alliance,” the cable quotes Mr. Campbell as saying. His Japanese counterpart, Kazuyoshi Umemoto, the director general of North American affairs at the Foreign Ministry, replied that his government must do more so “the public better understands threats to Japan.”—Martin Fackler, “Cables Show U.S. Concern on Japan’s Disaster Readiness,” NYTimes, May 3, 2011